Still More ObamaCare Lies

Accountability: President Obama says so many false things about ObamaCare that it's hard to keep up. But here are two more untruths that deserve debunking.

In speech after speech these days, Obama tries to shift blame for the ongoing ObamaCare debacles onto the backs of Republicans.

In late November, for example, Obama complained that "instead of rooting for failure, or refighting old battles, Republicans in Congress need to work with us to improve those things about the Affordable Care Act that aren't working as well as they should."

Obama's attempt to escape responsibility for the failure of his signature domestic achievement isn't surprising. But in this case, he's falsifying the record.

The fact is that Republicans in the House have already done much to fix ObamaCare, and Obama himself has signed many of those bills into law.

One of the first things Republicans did after taking control of the House was to repeal an onerous tax-reporting scheme Democrats tucked into the law, which would have buried businesses in IRS paperwork. Obama signed that in April 2011.

They also removed a "free-choice voucher" program that would have forced companies to hand vouchers to low-income workers who didn't want to sign up with their health plans.

They fixed an eligibility formula that would have let a couple making as much as $64,000 a year qualify for Medicaid, thereby saving taxpayers $13 billion.

Just this month, the House passed a bill to let individuals keep the plans they have. That, like many other House fixes, went nowhere in the Democratic Senate.

Meanwhile, Obama puts a happy face on ObamaCare by claiming it is already slowing health spending. "Thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act, health care costs are growing at the slowest rate in 50 years," he said recently. "Employer-based health care costs are growing at about one-third the rate of a decade ago."

This, too, is false. Yes, the rate of growth in national health spending has slowed in recent years. It was just 3.9% in 2009, 2010 and 2011. And employer premium growth had been on the downtrend.

But these have nothing to do with ObamaCare. The latest report from the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — the official scorekeeper of health spending — says the spending growth slowdown is "unrelated to the (Affordable Care Act)."

It also reports that ObamaCare will add to national spending over the next decade. Other reports have pinned much of the slowdown on the recession and Obama's lousy recovery that followed it. Plus, ObamaCare is now pushing premiums up.

As Charles Blahous, a former trustee for Social Security and Medicare, puts it, Obama's latest cost-cutting claims "are just as groundless as the ones that misled so many Americans to believe they would be able to keep their previous coverage."

Accountability: President Obama says so many false things about ObamaCare that it's hard to keep up. But here are two more untruths that deserve debunking.

In speech after speech these days, Obama tries to shift blame for the ongoing ObamaCare debacles onto the backs of Republicans.

In late November, for example, Obama complained that "instead of rooting for failure, or refighting old battles, Republicans in Congress need to work with us to improve those things about the Affordable Care Act that aren't working as well as they should."

Obama's attempt to escape responsibility for the failure of his signature domestic achievement isn't surprising. But in this case, he's falsifying the record.

The fact is that Republicans in the House have already done much to fix ObamaCare, and Obama himself has signed many of those bills into law.

One of the first things Republicans did after taking control of the House was to repeal an onerous tax-reporting scheme Democrats tucked into the law, which would have buried businesses in IRS paperwork. Obama signed that in April 2011.

They also removed a "free-choice voucher" program that would have forced companies to hand vouchers to low-income workers who didn't want to sign up with their health plans.

They fixed an eligibility formula that would have let a couple making as much as $64,000 a year qualify for Medicaid, thereby saving taxpayers $13 billion.

Just this month, the House passed a bill to let individuals keep the plans they have. That, like many other House fixes, went nowhere in the Democratic Senate.

Meanwhile, Obama puts a happy face on ObamaCare by claiming it is already slowing health spending. "Thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act, health care costs are growing at the slowest rate in 50 years," he said recently. "Employer-based health care costs are growing at about one-third the rate of a decade ago."

This, too, is false. Yes, the rate of growth in national health spending has slowed in recent years. It was just 3.9% in 2009, 2010 and 2011. And employer premium growth had been on the downtrend.

But these have nothing to do with ObamaCare. The latest report from the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — the official scorekeeper of health spending — says the spending growth slowdown is "unrelated to the (Affordable Care Act)."

It also reports that ObamaCare will add to national spending over the next decade. Other reports have pinned much of the slowdown on the recession and Obama's lousy recovery that followed it. Plus, ObamaCare is now pushing premiums up.

As Charles Blahous, a former trustee for Social Security and Medicare, puts it, Obama's latest cost-cutting claims "are just as groundless as the ones that misled so many Americans to believe they would be able to keep their previous coverage."

See Also

Taxes: Health and Human Services admits it sent nearly a million incorrect tax forms to ObamaCare enrollees. A government that can't even get something simple like this right has no business running health care.The form in question is a new one — Form 1095-A — that goes to anyone who ...

Phony Numbers: The Obama administration says more than 11 million signed up for ObamaCare this year. Should anyone believe this number? Even if it's true, is it a sign of success? The answer to both is a resounding no.In a staged video released on Tuesday, HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell tells ...

Hypocrisy: If ObamaCare is so great, why do Democrats repeatedly try to hide its more unpleasant features? The latest example is their desperate effort to grant still more exemptions to the law's individual mandate.This week, three House Democrats who helped usher ObamaCare through that chamber ...

Crony Socialism: Among ObamaCare's many bad ideas was the attempt to create an entirely new industry of nonprofit insurance co-ops. It is fast turning into a huge, multibillion-dollar taxpayer boondoggle.Created as an alternative to an outright "public option," the co-ops have received $2.5 billion ...

Spending: President Obama almost sounded like a free-market health care reformer during a recent interview. Too bad he can't even imagine letting the private sector fix things.in an interview published this week on Vox.com, Ezra Klein asks Obama why health care costs so much more in the U.S. than ...

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